Amanda Hoepfner had a bit of an identity crisis this fall when she began her first year of classes at the University of Utah. Amanda, 18, a 2006 graduate of Brighton High School, was peppered with questions when she began commuting 10 miles north to the Salt Lake City campus.

Her classmates - nearly all of them juniors and seniors - kept asking: "Are you a transfer student?"

Initially unsure how to reply, Hoepfner finally came up with an answer that raised even more questions: "I am a transfer student. From high school."

It's true. This year is Amanda's first on campus, but she's actually a college junior, barreling at warp speed toward the bachelor's degree she intends to earn by age 20. Then there's the M.B.A. If all goes according to plan, she'll have that degree in hand when she's 21 - when she also hopes to launch a career in international sales.

Her classmates aren't the only ones who don't immediately grasp Amanda's march through Utah's system of higher education; in fact, relatively few in the state are familiar with the program that put Amanda on a fast track toward a four-year degree.

But students, and especially parents, are starting to catch on to the advantages of the New Century Scholarship, an initiative that significantly reduces tuition while delivering high school graduates who have already earned associate's degrees to public institutions across the state.

The premise is simple: Introduced in 1999, New Century gives high school juniors the option of enrolling for a nominal fee in college-level classes, offered by a local community college or, in some cases, by Utah State University. Students who complete the requirements for an associate's degree by the September following their high school graduation can then transfer their credits - the equivalent of two full years of college - to a state college or university or to Brigham Young University, an independent college operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. An added bonus: Tuition for New Century participants enrolled in those schools is reduced by 75 percent.

For those keeping score, that's the first two years of college at no cost to students, and the remaining two years at just one-fourth of the sticker price.

Despite the deep discount, comparatively few Utah residents have taken the deal. From the program's inception through 2005, just 1,162 students have taken advantage of it. That number is slowly rising. In 2005, 300 signed on. And at Salt Lake City Community College, where academic adviser Angela Hale used to see just one potential New Century applicant a week, it's not unusual now for four or five students a day to ask her about the program, which is funded each year by state appropriation.

Utah Higher Education Commissioner Richard E. Kendell sees no reason why the program won't continue its recent growth. "If the kids haven't figured it out yet, the parents have," says Kendell. "They're sitting there with their checkbooks after they learn about (New Century) and saying, 'You passed up what?'"

Michelle Hanks is one parent who caught on - very quickly - during a meeting with a guidance counselor as her son Tyler entered his junior year at Brighton High. Practically on the spot, Hanks decided that Tyler's last two years of high school would, in effect, become his first two years of college. Then she told her son.

"He had no idea what college was about - the requirements, the credit hours, none of it," says Hanks. Nor was he familiar with college courses' traditional, and often trying, lecture format. "At first it was totally boring," Tyler recalls. "I wasn't used to a teacher talking all the time like that."

He proved a quick study. Now in his last year at Brighton, Tyler spends his days taking college language, math and science courses online or via a telecommunications hook-up between a Brighton computer lab and lecture halls at Utah State or in classes taught at the high school and at Salt Lake Community College. College student by day, Tyler makes the transition back to high school student once Brighton's final bell signals that it's time for him to participate in varsity basketball and other extracurricular activities. As he says: "It's the best of both worlds."

Brighton guidance counselor Allyson Stoddard cautions that it's not a world for everyone.

She characterizes Utah's system as one that offers three basic options for students pursuing postsecondary education. High school students planning to pursue a trade are encouraged to enroll in concurrent vocational classes often offered in conjunction with a community college. Those who have professional aspirations and the required academic aptitude enroll in Advanced Placement classes and compete for scholarships and admission to top-tier colleges and universities. In general, the New Century Scholarship appeals to students between those two extremes.

"It's mostly kids in the 3.0-3.5 (grade-point average) range," says Stoddard, "the middle-of-the-road kids whose parents look at this and see the dollar signs."

The attraction of the program is obvious, particularly for bright, ambitious students with an eye on the bottom line: It offers them the chance to wipe out mandatory college courses for a mere $35 registration fee and then gives them a 75 percent discount when they arrive at a baccalaureate institution.

As New Century comes of age, Utah's higher-ed commissioner hopes it will serve as an inducement to others.

"We are catching the kids who are self-motivated," Kendell says. "But the real task is getting kids who are not necessarily motivated and get them engaged. The way to do that is to get them into concurrent classes so they can see what it's like. It's a way of expanding the net."

At Brighton High School, Amanda Hoepfner's family was among the first to see the advantage of teaming New Century with the Advanced Placement curriculum. Her brother, Danial, blazed the trail when he entered the University of Utah three years ago with 102 credit hours, 18 shy of the school's graduation requirement. College, he recalls with studied nonchalance, "was basically just someplace bigger to find my classes."

Danial, now 21, has amassed more than 200 credit hours at Utah. He also has enough cash - from the 75 percent discount, scholarships and grants (thanks to his high scores on A.P. tests) - to pay for the next phase of his education, a graduate program in politics and inter- national studies at Ohio State University. For Danial, enrollment in Columbus was a mere formality. "I basically consider myself a graduate student right now," he said in September.

A prototypical New Century student, Brigham Young freshman Shantelle Smith enrolled in the program because her parents grasped the financial and academic implications early on.

"My mom helped me a lot," Shantelle said on a bright September morning, just hours before attending her first BYU home football game. "I wouldn't have been able to do it without her. She knew what classes I needed to take and how all the extracurricular stuff fit in. If I didn't have my mom, I'm not sure I could have done it."

During her four years at Brighton, Shantelle avoided A.P. courses and the rigorous, binding exams that accompany them. "I took community college (courses) because, if I did well, I was guaranteed credit. I knew if I took A.P., it wasn't guaranteed," she said.

Shantelle is by no means the exception, says Salt Lake Community College adviser Angela Hale. "A lot of students are steering away from A.P. because of the test they have to pass at the end of the year. It freaks a lot of them out," she says.

Initially, not even 60 college credits on her high school transcript made Shantelle a lock for admission into her first-choice college. Wait-listed by BYU when she applied as a freshman, Shantelle reapplied as a transfer student - and was accepted. A nursing major at BYU, she arrived on campus with half the credits necessary to graduate. She's keeping her "options open" about the possibility of changing majors and transferring to a public college or university. With classic understatement, she calls the 75 percent discount "a good deal."

The only private institution in the state that accepts New Century scholarships, BYU is still a bargain thanks to subsidies from the Mormon church that are passed along to students in the form of low tuition and fees.

With a relatively small and manageable population and a strong family orientation, Utah is in many ways the perfect incubator for a program like New Century. Still, even though the program is clearly working in the relatively affluent suburban setting where Brighton High School is located, questions remain about the program's effectiveness in urban schools.

Kendell acknowledges that New Century is still a work in progress in inner-city schools. But he predicts that a new statewide system of early-college high schools - funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as part of its nationwide network of such schools - will introduce the program's benefits to many more of Utah's low-income and underserved students.

In its attempt to make college more accessible and affordable for every young person in the state, Kendell said his agency, the Utah System of Higher Education, faces its greatest challenge in sparsely populated rural districts. "When you get a small high school with just 250 kids in it, it's difficult to justify getting even seven of those kids to take A.P. Calculus," he said.

That's where technology comes in. Utah State's presence at Brighton is a lab outfitted with microphone-equipped computers that allow students to participate in real-time lectures in courses such as American Civilization, Integrated Life Science and Introduction to Writing.

Once she got into the rhythm of college-level instruction, Shantelle Smith says, the learning was actually easier than in regular high school classes. She especially liked the telecom connection that allowed her to converse with Utah State professors 110 miles away, in Logan.

"I could talk over the microphone if I had a question," Shantelle recalls. "It was definitely different at first, and there was a lot more reading and a lot more studying. And I still felt like I was in high school; I don't feel like I missed out on high school at all."

From personal observation, Brighton guidance counselor Carolyn Chipman knows that active engagement in the coursework is often what students miss the most about high school - especially in the 12th grade.

"Some kids see their senior year as a float year," she says. "They get through all the hard classes in their sophomore and junior years, and then they basically forget how to study and work during their senior year."

New Century tends to reverse that trend, Chipman says.

After observing first-hand the workload her son is tackling as he approaches graduation from Brighton, Michelle Hanks brushes aside the notion that the senior year has become superfluous.

"Not if you're doing this," she says. Brighton High School counselor Allyson Stoddard says parents "look at this (program) and see the dollar signs."